Huggers: Re-bundling will be the next big disrupter

As millennial cord cutters go a la carte, ditching their cable subs in favour of hand-picked OTT services, Erik Huggers, the former Microsoft and BBC exec who is now shaking things up at Vevo, predicts that re-bundling will be the next big thing.

Speaking at Saturday afternoon’s keynote on Big Audiences and Music, the Vevo CEO, who developed the OTT service OnCue before Intel sold it to Verizon, told delegates that he was “laughed out the room” by his Intel colleagues three years ago when he talked about unbundling, “and now instead of picking channels you are picking apps”.

However, the digital disruptor, who has been coming to IBC since 1994, warned that consumers would soon tire of picking and choosing between 70 different vertical offerings.

“So the great unbundling has happened but what will happen next is that someone will come along and re-bundle it all up again because who wants to choose between 60 channels?”

According to Huggers, Amazon could be a winner in this re-bundling game with the launch of its new YouTube style service Amazon Direct.
As an exec now working in the music space, Huggers said that cable TV is visibly losing its young audiences.

He cited a recent deal with MTV which saw Vevo broadcast some of the live performances from the music broadcaster’s VMA awards resulted in a 35 per cent drop in viewers for MTV but a 1,400 uplift for Vevo.